dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997
Email Interview with Johan Grimonprez |
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Hans Ulrich Obrist: A question about digital television: so far, digital channels are being watched by very few people. Does this "non-Audimat" situation create a laboratory, openness for experiments? To finally go beyond program television whose "homogeneity... is intrinsically hostile to art" (Alexander Kluge)?
Johan Grimonprez: Couldn't homogeneity possibly trigger a creative context to read mainstream imagery in deviant ways, to read against the grain? Homogeneity, as a vocabulary, actually did provide a huge source of inspiration to explore certain themes in dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. How do you struggle as an artist or filmmaker to position yourself vis-à-vis mainstream media? Art and mainstream media seem to remain mad twin sisters, always arguing. Hence the rivalry between a novelist and a terrorist staged as a metaphor in dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. In this plot it's the terrorist who holds the winning hand, since he's able to play the media. The narrative is taken from Don DeLillo's book Mao II, which contends that the novelist's role within society has been replaced by that of bomb-makers and gunmen. "What terrorists gain, novelists lose," says the book. The end of the film, though, alludes to the fact that the media nowadays outplays the terrorist. With 600 channels soon provided on New York cable, might the overall homogeneity not desire the other part: the urge for an extreme diversity, a kind of supermarket idea with specialized departments, evidently to push the viewer's quota? The recent corporate merger of ATT-telephone, MediaOne and Microsoft might very well give new meaning to the act of zapping. Impossible to surf every channel in a night. We are destined to plug in the internet browser, let the search engine pop up our favourite clips from the sci-fi channel or the history channel. We could also let the shuffle function simply perform the zapping for us, click for: TELEVISION ON MUTE and tune the stereo to some inflight groove.
The homogeneity of mainstream imagery does not necessarily dictate a homogeneous perception of that imagery. Image reception among the Warlpiri community at Yuendumu (Central Australia), for example, sustain cultural invention. Decodings of Jackie Chan movies or Australian TV-soaps like Neighbours would be interpreted along kinship obligations and different storylines appropriate to Warlpiri narrative. Similarly the gossip culture of Catholic mothers in Northern Ireland would see Joan Collins from the feuilleton Dynasty as an emancipatory icon: wasn't Joan rich enough to act independently and trash all those men? Translation of global culture across geographical (and political) boundaries can be read in most contradictory ways: commercials were the most powerful messages of the West, remarked East German writer Heiner Müller.
The television viewer is maybe not a passive consumer: isn't there always a sense of appropriation, creating one's own terms to read mainstream imagery with a certain iconoclastic pleasure? It became the point of departure to set up a mobile video-library: Beware! In playing the phantom, you become one, a project made in collaboration with film critic Herman Asselberghs, which has been travelling since its initiation in 1994.
H.U.O.: Beware! In playing the phantom, you become one is your mobile video-library and archive. It includes films, documentary films, commercials, soaps and sitcoms. The programme changed from Kassel to Paris where it was shown after Documenta X. How do you relate global issues through a travelling archive with local adaptations and local necessities? It is interesting that the programme in Paris was different, it is no longer possible to send homogeneous exhibitions on tour and impose them to places. The terms have to be (re)negotiated every time.
McLuhan speaks of hot and cold media, cold media being participatory media with few details, like paper, while hot media offer little possibility for participation—for example, television. How do you integrate participatory elements into your films and other works in general?
In an interview I recently made with Alexander Kluge he said that he tried to make films which are also, in your words, "the ideology of zapping which can be an extreme form of poetry, going much further than collage". Could you tell me about this last point, about how zapping transcends collage, where does it lead?
J.G.: The participatory elements would be sometimes as simple as a hot cup of coffee! We would never install our video-library without having cookies, the smell of coffee and the remote control present. These elements already induce a platform of conviviality, an atmosphere for chatting. You are invited to pick up the remote to zap through your own choice of videotapes, in a way to be your own curator. The stack of tapes we put out range from twisted commercials, underground documentaries and alternative MTV to mainstream stuff spun off from Hollywood and CNN. The visitors are also invited to include their own homegrown camcorder tapes: their honeymoon horrors, UFO- testimonies, their top ten of Oprah Winfrey shows.
The library alluded to the fact that the very act of watching television already contains a participatory nature. The way we receive, contextualize and recontextualize images—it's exactly what we do with the zapping tool (say: "zaptitude"). Zapping buys into the supermarket ideology, but at the same time it can embody a critical distance as well. It stems in fact from video deck terminology: zapping, i.e. fast-forwarding the videotape past the commercial. Commercial break = zapping time. In this sense, zapping technology allows for a poetic analysis or interpretation of what is seen.
No need to zap though, the poetry is right there on CNN. CNN has totally surpassed the way Eisenstein and Vertov envisioned montage as a revolutionary tool. Similarly in how the avant-garde filmmakers of the sixties and seventies have become displaced by MTV's nature to swallow every different sort of novel style. The arrival of MTV on Muscovite TV in Russia was trumpeted in the Russian press as the biggest event since the 1917 October revolution: Vertov reconsidered through the eyes of MTV.
A zapping mode splices blood with ketchup, like CNN: images of war cut with strawberry ice-cream. It would rather point at an epistemological shift in how a "zaptitude" has transformed the way we look at reality. A jumpy fast-forward vision has replaced our conventional models of perception and experience. Sometimes I don't even know anymore if we're still in the middle of the commercial break or whether the film has already started. Soon we'll be mistaking reality for a commercial break.
H.U.O.: The taboo of visible death is usually kept from the public sphere into the private realm. dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y evokes Holbein's sarcophagus painting where the viewer is both inside and outside and the active and passive view coincide. Allegorical death and death as a dumb fact.
We are inside and outside, there is the obsession with death in dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. (You elsewhere described TV's complicity with death as "the desire we have for the ultimate disaster is one aspect of our relationship with death".) It reminds us of what Georges Didi-Huberman wrote about Sarcophage: "Ce que je vois, ce que je regarde." In your text Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter? you write: "The observer observed."
J.G.: Paul Virilio remarked once that television turned the world into an accident, and that with the advent of virtual reality the whole of reality will be "accidented". Each technology invents its own catastrophe, and with it a different relationship to death. The boat invented the sinking of the boat, the airplane invented the crash of the airplane. Television has reinvented the way we perceive reality and the way we relate to catastrophe, history and death.
TV has turned our notions of private and public inside out, but, more importantly, the representational modes for portraying actuality and imagination have become intertwined: CNN borrows from Hollywood and vice versa. The everyday talk show has zapped the family right off their couch and into the studio. In the opposite direction, catastrophe culture invades our living room.
The territory of the home overlaps with the space of TV in a much more profound and psychological way than we are possibly aware. dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y ends with a scene of a hijacked, crashing plane, accidentally framed by some honeymooner's camcorder. The couple was immediately invited to guest on Larry King's talk show on CNN to tell how they were able to shoot the footage! The dynamics of abstract capitalism thus allow the spectators to be the heroes and political issues are simply reduced to explanations of how to operate a camcorder. Patricia Mellencamp calls it the shift from catastrophe to comedy: "We can't change the world, but we can change our socks." According to one Nike ad: "It's not a shoe, it's a revolution."
First published as: Obrist, H.U., "Email interview with Johan Grimonprez", in Camera Austria, no. 66 (1999).